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Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The 18,000 NASA employees are full of galactic talents and abilities and are ready to accomplish whatever they're directed to do.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It's not pretty. But it's striking, I'll give it that. It's not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.
P. J. O'Rourke
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You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
P. J. O'Rourke
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It is important to remember when making jokes about women, that they are not a minority. They weren't captured on another continent and brought here in leg-irons (funny shoes, yes, but not leg-irons) and Hitler didn't blame them for Germany's loss in WWI. Therefore, you can make any kind of fun of them you want.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.
P. J. O'Rourke
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You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
P. J. O'Rourke
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I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.
P. J. O'Rourke
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[Friedrich] Hayek is not protesting that things like child labor and stuff are good. He's just trying to show that when government undertakes to make everything good for everybody, this is what happens. And he addresses it to socialists of all parties.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
P. J. O'Rourke
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People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'
P. J. O'Rourke
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You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.
P. J. O'Rourke
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President Obama has contempt for real money.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Politics is the one field you don't age out of.
P. J. O'Rourke
